Great Australian Outback Yarns, page 18
Anyhow, before we left the clinic at the defence facility, a nurse came to me and reported that, when they’d gone through the man’s clothing, they’d found twenty-two fifty-dollar notes and three bags of opals. I’d say that each bag would’ve held around a cup full of opals. So, in all, there was a hell of a lot of money involved. Anyhow, for safekeeping, I took the money and the three bags of opals to the bank and placed them into their care until the guy had recovered enough to collect his loot. Now, something that did aggrieve me was that, after having sorted out the woman’s death and looking after the boy and then organising the RFDS plane and accompanying the guy down to Adelaide and getting him settled in hospital, when I sent him a bill, the bugger never bothered paying up, nor did I receive one word of thanks for what I’d done. So I really lost out on that one.
Now, talking about losing: a few years before I’d arrived at the defence facility, the road to the nearest big town was little more than a dirt track, consisting of a myriad of corrugations, along with numerous deep potholes, which were full of bulldust. The story goes that one time, in the dead of winter, when the icy winds were blowing in from the desert, the police were called out to transport a deceased male from the defence facility down to the nearest city for a postmortem. To do the transportation, the powers that be sent out two coppers: a wily old sergeant, who had years of experience behind him, and a cocky young know-it-all constable, fresh from the police academy.
The vehicles they used back in those days were those short-wheel base Land Rovers. If you’ve never seen one: the short-wheelbased Land Rover is configured in such a way that, running down the back, from the driver’s cabin, they had a sort of running board of seats down both sides. In between the two sides of seats there was a well, or a central space, where the passengers could put their feet. Now the length of the space from the back of the driver’s ‘cab’ to the two back doors of the vehicle would’ve measured just over a metre and a half. Unfortunately, in this case, the coffin, containing the deceased male, was just a few inches longer than that metre and a half. And so, after they’d loaded the coffin, containing the deceased male, they couldn’t quite close the back doors of the Land Rover. To that end they had to tie the doors down securely enough so that the coffin wouldn’t fall out during the rough and rugged journey back to their homebase.
‘I’ll sort it out, Sarge,’ said the cocky young constable. ‘I topped me class in knot-tying at the academy.’
‘Okay, go for it,’ said the wily old sergeant and he handed the young feller a length of rope.
It’s been said that it was quite a sight to see the young constable in action. What he did with that length of rope amazed all onlookers; the way he manoeuvred the rope around the back door handles with a flick of the wrist that way, then a flick of the wrist the other way, then an up and over and around like magic. When the knot had been completed, he stood back in admiration of his own handiwork.
‘There you go, Sarge,’ he said. ‘That coffin won’t budge an inch.’
‘Goodo,’ replied the sergeant, then they jumped into the Land Rover and off they headed, back home, across this rugged dirt road. Six hours later, when they arrived at the hospital to deliver the body, the young constable was out of the Land Rover in a shot and around the back to untie his handiwork.
That’s when the sergeant heard the expletive of ‘Shit!’ And when he got around to the back of the vehicle, the two back doors were wide open, and the rope had disappeared, as had the coffin.
‘Oh Jesus, Sarge,’ the young constable said, ‘I must’a got me reef knots mixed up wiff me slip knots ’n me half-hitches.’
With this being in the middle of winter, there was little chance of the body decomposing overnight and so the old sergeant said, ‘Well, we’ll just have to go back along the track early tomorrow ’n hope we can find the body before the dingoes get to it.’
‘Yeah, I guess so,’ said the young constable before adding, ‘Sorry, Sarge.’
‘That’s okay, son,’ replied the sergeant, ‘we live and we learn.’
Later that evening, while the young sergeant was rechecking his manual on ‘the art of tying knots’, the old Sarge slipped into the Land Rover and he headed back out along the track.
The following day, at the crack of dawn, the two policemen met up outside the police station. They got back into the Land Rover and they set off to find the body of the male deceased. Which they did. About fifty miles down the track, the young constable yelled out, ‘There he is, Sarge! Over there.’
And there he was. Though for some strange reason the deceased male had somehow ended up in an upright sitting position, against the only tree within cooee. On further inspection, the coffin had disappeared. Presumably it’d been snaffled by the person who’d found the body and had been taken away to be used as firewood to tide them through the cold winter nights. But even stranger still was that, when they went over to the body, the deceased man was holding a small posy of flowers in his hands.
‘Gee, Sarge,’ said the young constable, ‘what’s them flowers he’s holding?’
‘Well, son,’ said the wily old sergeant, ‘they’re what’s called forget-me-knots.’
Telling a Tale out of School
(Outback School Stories)
I had no experience of country life whatsoever. I was born in the city. Grew up in the city. Didn’t even have any relatives who lived on farms. That was until I met my husband. He came from a station property out of Meekatharra. He’d attended a boarding school in Perth from the age of seven, and so he’d spent quite a bit of time in the city. Anyhow we subsequently met up and married and I went north with him, and we eventually ended up owning a station property in the Gascoyne region of Western Australia, called Dairy Creek, which was just under half a million acres. In those earlier days, Dairy Creek was predominantly sheep, then we did our last shearing in 1999 and after that it became totally a cattle place.
By the time we’d moved onto Dairy Creek we’d had two children — a girl and a boy. Our daughter was three and our son eighteen months. There was no school out there, of course. The nearest one would’ve been Gascoyne Junction, which was eighty kilometres away and it was only a primary school. The closest town that had both a primary school and a high school was Carnarvon, and Carnarvon was something like two hundred and fifty kilometres away. So that definitely wasn’t an option. Our only real option was School of the Air, out of Carnarvon.
With School of the Air, I taught our daughter for her first year, which I must say was sometimes a little fraught. To this day she’ll tell you that she’s been psychologically scarred by having been taught by her mother. However, she hasn’t seemed to have suffered too many ill effects. Then from Year 8 to Year 12 she went to boarding school in Perth. She did well there, then she went on to study naturopathy and has since done Psychology with Honours. So in spite of that first year of School of the Air with Mum, she’s done well.
But teaching distance education to your own child was quite stressful and so, after that first year with my daughter, we decided to have governesses. And we had some great governesses. Excellent in fact. In the early part we had a lovely soft, gentle girl which would’ve been in great contrast to me. She stayed for two years, then we got a sweet girl who’d just finished school. She also stayed for two years. She placed a huge emphasis on art and the creative side of things. The next governess was musical. She played a guitar and composed a song which our children sang over the School of the Air radio. She was fun and light-hearted, so both the children got to experience yet another aspect of life from her. Then our daughter went off to boarding school and, for our son’s last year of primary schooling, we got a very academic girl. But because our son wasn’t at all academically inclined, they didn’t really connect, and that proved to be a little tricky. For the most part he was more interested in being outside, doing something with his dad. Still, she pushed him, which was good because the next year, when he went to boarding school down in Perth, he was probably more prepared for high school than he otherwise might’ve been.
Of course, with living out on a property, there were always distractions and sometimes the children would run amuck. We had a big creek running past our house and if it rained, the creek would run. When that happened, at any opportunity, the kids would take off down to the creek, shedding clothes and shoes as they went. Never to be seen again. They’d go completely deaf at that point and wouldn’t hear us calling them back to the homestead for lessons. So we’d end up having to take off our own shoes and traipse up the creek in search of them, and there they’d be, building dams or playing some sort of game in or around the water. It was all such a great adventure for them. Then when they were older their games involved racing down the creek in tyre tubes, with their mother’s heart in her mouth, wondering if she’d ever see them again. And that was more or less the pattern of everyday life while the creek was running. It was far more exciting than having to do schoolwork and, of course, you couldn’t stop them from having a bit fun, could you?
In many ways distance education had its ups and downs. On the one hand it was good to have that one-on-one teaching experience with your own children, where you wouldn’t leave a subject behind unless they fully understood it. As for the difficulties of distance education: there was always the ever-present anxiety of not knowing where your child was positioned in the scheme of things, and that always left you wondering if you were teaching your child in the right way. But in general, I think the children got a solid basic educational grounding. Though mind you, when both the children were finally in boarding school, I remember thinking, Thank goodness that’s over.
Now as for the way they went about their lessons — or ‘sets’ as they were known — they were sent out in packages from Carnarvon on the mail truck. I can’t quite remember the finer details now but I think they came as two-week sets of schooling and the children worked their way through those, under the supervision of either myself or the governess. Then at the end of those two weeks your child did a test on them, which you submitted for marking and any comments or advice the teachers at School of the Air wanted to make were sent out on the following week’s mail truck.
That’s how it was supposed to work but, in our case, we most probably received several weeks of sets in one go, if not a whole term, because there were always occasions when the road was closed and the mail couldn’t get through. Then in addition to having to do your sets of lessons, each day of the school week there was a half-hour School of the Air session over the radio. All the various station children joined in on those. Anyhow, before those half-hour lessons began, while the kids were settling in, they’d be asked if they wanted to share any news they may have and, at times, some of those were quite revealing and funny.
There’s just one little classic of a story. Mind you, this may be telling a tale out of school, and it is really only hearsay. But as folklore has it: one time over the School of the Air radio this little boy was asked if he had any news he’d like to share. Now these radio sessions are broadcast throughout the entire region, so everybody for hundreds of miles around was listening in and what’s more they were well aware that the boy’s mother was away, off visiting relatives or whatever. Anyhow there’d been a thunderstorm out on this little boy’s property the night before.
The teacher welcomed the boy on the air. ‘And have you any news you’d like to share, Tommy?’
‘Yes, Miss.’
‘Let’s hear it then.’
‘Well, Miss, there was a really big thunderstorm out here last night, Miss, and I’m very scared of the thunder.’
‘Oh yes, and so what did you do?’
‘Well, Miss, I went to get into bed with Daddy, Miss, and guess what, Miss?’
‘What, Tommy?’
‘Well, Miss, our governess must’ve been scareder of the thunder than me ’cause she was already in bed with Daddy!’
Dr Clyde Fenton
(More Flying Doctor Stories)
Clyde Fenton was one of the first real ‘Flying Doctors’. I say that because not only was he a doctor but he was also one of the very rare ones that actually flew the aeroplane. In fact, as a pilot during the war, he had an outstanding record and he was the Commanding Officer of Number 6 Communications Unit, out of Batchelor, which was about 60 kilometres south of Darwin.
Now, I don’t know whether he had a plane when he first went to Katherine as a doctor or whether he bought the plane after he’d gone to Katherine. I somehow have a feeling it was after he’d gone to Katherine that he bought himself a little plane. This is all second-hand, of course, but they say that Clyde was a real daredevil in the air. When he was up in Darwin he wasn’t adverse to doing a few loop-d-loops over the airfield or taking a low skim over the outdoor picture theatre at night, to put the wind up the patrons, or even dive bombing groups who were out having a picnic.
Really, it sounded like he was a bit of a frustrated adventurer and so he was prepared to take some pretty huge risks with some of the flights that he did. Now, don’t get me wrong: he was both a very good doctor and an excellent pilot and he saved many lives. I guess all those sorts of people took huge risks at some stage to get out into some of those more remote areas to help people who were in need. Still, it doesn’t help anybody too much if they crash the plane on the way out or on the way back, does it? But that’s the way it goes and sometimes you can’t do too much about it.
Still, I find it interesting that when you look at plane crashes these days, very few people walk away from them, yet back then people did seem to survive more often, didn’t they? Perhaps it had something to do with the lesser speeds they travelled at, because the planes back in those early days were made from not much more than wood and canvas so they’d rip apart upon contact with the ground, which was something that Clyde managed to do on a few occasions. I grew up at Humbert River Station, in the central west of the Northern Territory, and I heard about the time when Clyde crashed a plane out on our neighbouring property of Victoria River Downs Station and the wreckage had to be packed up and put on the back of a truck and driven all the way back to Katherine.
It’s also well documented that Clyde had a running battle with anything to do with ‘the establishment’. In actual fact, he railed against anything to do with authority so, of course, just the mention of the Department of Civil Aviation, or DCA, had him seeing red. At one stage the DCA changed the licensing regulations and naturally Clyde steadfastly refused to go for this new licence. He considered it was just a whole lot of ‘red tape, mumbo-jumbo and hog-wash’. Then when they threatened to take away his licence he flew over the house of the boss of the DCA and dropped a few flour bombs on the place. They even tried grounding him on a few occasions. But Clyde never ever took any notice. He simply continued on flying with his old licence. He’d just fly off anyway. I mean, nobody would dob him in if he was going out into the bush to help someone, would they?
So yes, Clyde was a real larrikin, alright. There’s even been a couple of books written about him and his exploits. Just an example of one of those was the story about when he received the medal. That was when he was in Katherine; he was decorated with some sort of bravery award or other that came in the form of a medal. Anyway, because it had to do with ‘authority’ he didn’t want anything to do with it. That’s how anti-government and anti-establishment he was. But anyway, all these bigwigs still insisted on coming down to Katherine to present him with this special medal. So when they arrived at the Katherine Hospital, Clyde had all the staff lined up to greet them, and that included all the Aboriginal staff, who he greatly admired. And, much to the bigwigs’ surprise and shock, Clyde had made mock tin replicas of the medal he was about to receive and he’d given one to every single member of the staff to wear on their uniform for the big occasion.
Of course, that didn’t go over very well. But that was Clyde, and he was tremendously admired up in the Northern Territory, not only for the good he did as a doctor and pilot but also because of his larrikin ways. He was one of those that always tried to buck the system, and we tend to admire people like that in Australia, don’t we?
Off
(Flying Doctor Stories)
It’s not like being a normal doctor, working as we do, away out here. You haven’t got the luxury of being able to sit down face to face with a patient to make a learned diagnosis. What’s more, more often than not the initial contact is carried out through a third party. So you have to be a bit of a mind reader as well as having a good grounding in the bush lingo.
Imagine, for example, a new doctor, fresh to the Flying Doctor Service with hardly any experience of bush people at all. Some bloke’s taken ill, way out on a remote station somewhere. Normally, those types of males feel awkward about talking to a doctor about their problems, let alone anyone else, so the wife’s the initial contact.
‘Hello, Doctor, me hubby’s taken crook,’ she might say.
‘What do you mean, crook? How crook is he?’ the doctor would ask.
‘Darl, the doctor wants to know how crook yer are,’ she says, asking her hubby.
‘Tell him I’m as crook as a dog,’ comes the chap’s voice.
‘Doctor, he reckons he’s real crook.’
‘Can you give me some idea as to where he’s feeling crook?’
‘Darl,’ she asks, ‘the doctor wants to know where yer feeling crook?’
‘Christ, woman, I’m feeling crook all over.’
‘Doctor,’ she says, ‘Hubby reckons he’s feeling crook all over.’
‘Well,’ says the doctor, ‘before I can prescribe treatment, we’ve got to isolate the problem area, okay? So let’s start from the top. Is he crook in the head?’
‘Darl, the doctor wants to know if yer crook in the head.’
